That he was hiding in plain sight -- in a beach resort hotel in the Mexican Riviera town of Mazatlan -- is as dramatic a twist in the manhunt for Guzman as is the narrative behind his life and his control of the international Sinaloa drug cartel.

Here are three reasons why the arrest of Guzman -- now being held by Mexican authorities and sought for extradition by U.S. authorities -- matters so much.

1. His legend

Chicago declared him and his use of the city as a drug-dealing hub as Public Enemy No. 1, joining bygone gangster Al Capone in that distinction.

West Point's Combating Terrorism Center devoted a report to the international presence of Guzman and his drug trafficking.

Perhaps most importantly, El Chapo is synonymous with narco culture and its lurid glorification. Guzman, 56, is the drug kingpin extraordinaire.

El Chapo, which means "Shorty" in Spanish, inspires American rap songs and a genre of Mexican ballads called narcocorridos.

"All I wanna be is El Chapo, Three billion dollars in pesos" is part of the chorus to a 2012 rap by Gucci Mane.

Maybe the most potent message of El Chapo's arrest is how it undermines his most audacious myth -- that he could never be caught again, unfindable in Mexico's back country.

Guzman had been caught once before by Mexican authorities, in 2001, but he escaped from a high-security Mexican prison. Lore holds that he slipped out of the prison by hiding in a laundry basket.

"He kind of plays up to it. All these guys do," Scott Stewart, vice president at Stratfor, a global intelligence firm, said about the El Chapo legends. "It just kind of adds to the whole mythology -- kind of like the old pulp Western books they used to write about these outlaws."

Guzman had eluded authorities since the 2001 prison break because he cultivated an old-school mafia style of bribing officials at every level of government throughout Latin America, officials said.

2. One of the world's most wanted

Guzman's drug operation is believed to have penetrated not just all of the Americas, but Europe, Australia and west Africa as well, according to the West Point report.

"The United States remains the most important demand market for Sinaloa Federation products---marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines. The European Union and Australia, however, have proven attractive due to the economics of price elasticity and their distance from the supply source," according to the report.

But authorities have been mounting pressure on Guzman's Sinaloa cartel in recent months.

His lieutenants have been killed or captured by Mexican authorities. Earlier police operations yielded a trove of intelligence, including cell phone and other data, a U.S. law enforcement official said. That helped Mexican authorities and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents hunting Guzman gain confidence in recent weeks that they could arrest him.

"Although it's a ridiculous phrase, the world's most wanted drug lord is accurate," said Malcom Beith, author of "The Last Narco," which is about Mexico's drug war. "There's tons of other drug lords around, but I think the Sinaloa cartel, given its growth, given its influence hemispheric and otherwise, I think that puts him on the top."

Phil Jordan, who spent three decades with the DEA and headed the agency's El Paso Intelligence Center, also characterized Guzman in superlatives.

"When you arrest the most powerful man in the Americas and in Mexico, if you talk to any cartel member, they'll say that he's more powerful than Mexican President Pena Nieto," Jordan said. "This would be a significant blow to the overall operations not only in the Americas, but Chapo Guzman had expanded to Europe. He was all over the place."

Even Forbes magazine put Guzman among its World's Most Powerful People since 2009. Forbes estimated his fortune at more than $1 billion.

3. U.S. indictments

Guzman's arrest has re-energized Mexican and U.S. lawmen who spent years tracking his cartel and yet unable to capture him -- until now.

The United States doesn't want to see Guzman escape again.

That's why they are eager to see him extradited to the United States as soon as possible, where he is named in multiple federal drug indictments and has been on the DEA's most-wanted list.

"It is a significant arrest, provided he gets extradited immediately to the United States," Jordan told CNN. "If he does not get extradited, then he will be allowed to escape within a period of time."

Added one U.S. official: "Now comes the hard part."

That official was referring to Guzman's extradition to the United States.

Why didn't 'El Chapo' open fire during raid?

Guzman had an assault rifle handy when authorities raided his beachside hideaway over the weekend, but the world's most wanted drug lord never opened fire.

That's because marines used infrared and body-heat scanners to pinpoint the locations of everyone inside the condo and make sure they were asleep, a Mexican official said.

Saturday's early morning operation that captured Guzman in the Mexican Pacific resort town of Mazatlan marked a dramatic twist in a case that has long captivated the country and frustrated investigators on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The notorious Sinaloa cartel leader's nickname, which means "Shorty," belies the tall and near-mythic status Guzman achieved in recent years for his ability to elude capture by using bribes, safe houses and an army of cartel helpers.

His 13 years on the lam ended Saturday inside a no-frills condo tower.

The Mexican official, who asked not to be identified because he's not authorized to speak publicly about the case, said that Guzman, his wife and a bodyguard were all sleeping inside the condo, along with the drug lord's 2-year-old twin daughters.

Escape through sewer tunnels

Guzman had an assault rifle and ammunition close by when Mexican marines broke into the apartment in a "surgical" operation, the Mexican official said.

Authorities had been closing in on Guzman for months before Mexican marines swooped in, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam told reporters.

Earlier police operations yielded a trove of intelligence, including cell phone and other data, a U.S. law enforcement official said. That helped Mexican authorities and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents hunting Guzman gain confidence in recent weeks that they could arrest him.

Before Guzman's capture, Mexican federal forces made several significant arrests of Sinaloa cartel associates, including two people authorities said were suspected of providing security for top leaders of the cartel.

A key discovery earlier this month marked a turning point in the investigation: seven houses in the Mexican city of Culiacan, connected by secret tunnels that also tied in with the city's sewage system.

Mario Hidalgo Arguello, a courier who flipped during questioning by Mexican authorities, told interrogators about the series of safe houses, according to U.S. officials familiar with the hunt for Guzman.

When authorities raided one of them last week, it turned out to be Guzman's main residence in the town of Culiacan. The time it took Mexican marines to get past the house's reinforced steel doors was enough to allow Guzman to escape via a hidden hatch under a bathtub, the officials said.

"But the investigation was so thorough that we continued," Murillo said.

With authorities temporarily off his trail, Guzman slipped out of Culiacan through the sewer tunnels, the Mexican official told CNN. Eventually he made his way to Mazatlan, a beach resort city about 125 miles (200 km) away.

Informants and wiretaps

Months before authorities nabbed him there, U.S. authorities made a major break in the case.

In November, they arrested Serafin Zambada-Ortiz at the Nogales, Arizona, border crossing. He is the son of Guzman's closest lieutenant, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, likely the Sinaloa chief's heir apparent.

The arrests intensified in recent months, with each providing phones that led to a trove of new data that helped map associates in ever-closer touch with Guzman, U.S. officials familiar with the hunt said.

Agents from the DEA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Marshals Service have fed intelligence gleaned from wiretaps and informants to Mexican authorities for years.

Each cell phone led to dozens of others over time. "It went from phone to phone, just basic law enforcement," one of the U.S. officials said.

In recent months, investigators focused on five wiretaps -- four operated by the DEA and one by ICE, which yielded valuable intelligence, the officials said. As the hunt intensified, Guzman and his lieutenants stopped using certain phones, apparently aware of the surveillance. In the final days, the ICE wiretap was the only one still producing activity, the officials said.

Captured alongside Guzman was Carlos Manuel Hoo-Ramirez, who U.S. authorities say appeared to serve as "El Chapo's" communications conduit. He carried multiple phones that proved crucial to finding the drug boss, the officials said.

Hunt marked by rumors, close calls

Ever since his escape in a laundry cart from Mexico's Puente Grande prison in 2001, the hunt for Guzman has grabbed headlines.

During the drug lord's nearly 13 years on the lam, rumors swirled about his whereabouts.

From time to time, investigators suggested they were hot on his trail. But even as Mexico stepped up its pressure on cartels, he remained an elusive target. Many in the country suggested that his whereabouts were an open secret -- and that the government must have been deliberately steering clear of capturing him.

In 2009, the archbishop of Mexico's Durango state told reporters that Guzman lived near the mountain town of Guanacevi.

"Everyone knows it, except the authorities," he said.

Days later, investigators found the bodies of two slain army lieutenants in Durango's mountains, accompanied by a note: "Neither the government nor priests can handle El Chapo."

A year later, when asked by reporters again about Guzman's whereabouts, the archbishop said, "He is omnipresent. ... He is everywhere."

In 2012, a Mexican official told the Associated Press that authorities nearly caught Guzman in a raid on a beach mansion in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, barely a day after Hillary Clinton had met with other foreign ministers from across the hemisphere in the same resort town.

Last year, Guatemalan authorities said a man who resembled Guzman died in Peten, Guatemala, during a shootout. Later, they changed their story and said Guzman wasn't killed and the shootout may never even have happened.

Family still in spotlight

While Guzman managed to avoid authorities' attention, the wrath of his rivals and the media's glare, other members of his family weren't so lucky.

Authorities arrested Guzman's brother, known as "El Pollo" (The Chicken), in Mexico City in September 2001. Three years later, he was shot to death by a fellow inmate in a maximum-security prison.

Legend has it that "El Chapo" Guzman was also once arrested in Mexico's capital, according to an account in Malcolm Beith's book "The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo, the World's Most Wanted Drug Lord."

"At the police station, he lifted up a suitcase and put it on the desk of the capital's chief of police," Beith writes. "Inside was $50,000 in cash; within minutes, Chapo was out the door."

Members of a rival cartel gunned down Edgar Beltran Guzman, one of El Chapo's sons, in a Mexican shopping mall parking lot in 2008. Police found more than 500 bullet casings at the scene.

But not all of the focus on Guzman's family has been tied to organized crime.

In September 2011, word eked out that Guzman's beauty-queen wife, Emma Coronel -- a citizen of both the United States and Mexico -- had given birth to twin girls at a hospital in Lancaster, California.

About a year later, authorities arrested Alejandrina Gisselle Guzman Salazar, one of El Chapo's daughters, at a border crossing in San Ysidro, California. She was deported back to Mexico several months later.

Her attorneys said she was pregnant and had been coming to the United States to have a baby.